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Tuning Linux VM swapping
Lank writes "Kernel developers started discussing the pros and cons of swapping to disk on the Linux Kernel mailing list. KernelTrap has coverage of the story on their homepage. Andrew Morton comments, 'My point is that decreasing the tendency of the kernel to swap stuff out is wrong. You really don't want hundreds of megabytes of BloatyApp's untouched memory floating about in the machine. Get it out on the disk, use the memory for something useful.' Personally, I just try to keep my memory usage below the physical memory in my machine, but I guess that's not always possible..."
"You really don't want hundreds of megabytes of BloatyApp's untouched memory floating about in the machine. Get it out on the disk, use the memory for something useful."
I absolutely despise the way that XP swaps out applications in order to make the disk cache larger. I have 1GB of RAM on my machine precisely so I don't have to wait two minutes for it to swap my web browser back in after it's swapped out... yet if I copy a 2GB file from one drive to another, the stupid operating system will swap out all the applications it can just to make the cache larger.
Please, please, don't take Linux down the same braindead route as Microsoft has done for XP. It's utterly insane to swap out my browser so that a 2GB file can be copied two seconds faster when I then have to wait two minutes for the browser to swap back in. Or at least provide some kind of '#define STOP_VM_SWAPPING_STUPIDITY' so that I can disable it.
She had just procured a new Sun machine with 2 GB of RAM. Mind you, disk space hadn't grown all that significantly and you could still get machines with 9 GB drives.
The original practice was to make swap 2xRAM. So when the student she had putting the machine came to her and said, "What do I make swap?" she responded "Twice the RAM."
He said, "Are you sure? That's like almost half the boot drive."
She thought about it for a second and said, "Oh, yeah. I guess just make it the same as the RAM."
So this begs the questions: What do you make your swap now? When does your rule of thumb change? And remember when you could run a "fast" linux box on a P100 with 64MB of RAM and 128MB of swap?
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Well, disk access speed, say 5ms. RAM access speed 10ns so RAM is approx half a million times faster than disk.
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No, turning off swap is not disastrous. We've turned it off on our production web server cluster that routinely serves 60Mb sustained traffic. We've turned it off because we have 2GB of ram in these machines, and Linux insisted on preferring buffers and cache over our running applications. Fuck that, we said. With over 1GB Of buffers and cache, we had RAM to spare; bye-bye swap.
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Another reason to gradually and pro-actively swap things out, is that when another program later needs a lot of memory, your system doesn't come to a grinding halt because suddenly a lot of stuff has to be swapped out at once (followed by zeroing all that memory, since you don't want to have one program leaking data to another).
At least, that's the rationale I've read behind OS X's strategy of swapping things out long before all physical memory is used (and of keeping a pool of zeroed memory pages ready to fulfill most requests). Note that this does not require superfluous swap-ins if your reuse strategy is balanced properly, as the fact that something is swapped out doesn't mean that the memory which contained that data will be cleared/reused immediately (i.e., if it's needed again shortly afterwards, that page can be reactivated without having to go to disk).
Under most desktop OS'es, programs can even give some hints to the system regarding their usage of a memory region using e.g. the madvise() system call.
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Without a swap file, the kernel has no place to stick memory segments that are rarely used. They stay in resident memory la-la land until the process is terminated. Those segments add up over time and erode the memory available to the page cache.
Page caches are wonderful. When you load an application (like Firefox), you're not just getting the web browser. You're firing up a large chain of shared objects/DLLs that support the widgets, I/O, and components of the application. All of these components must be read into memory anyhow for program operation, so the kernel tends to just leave it in there for future use (the page cache).
When you shutdown Firefox, you're also releasing the necessity of those libraries (provided nothing else is using them). Those libraries also remove themselves from memory. If you load another application (like Thunderbird) that uses the same type of libraries, the kernel will not have to go to disk in order to fetch those libraries. It will instead opt for the page cache contents.
Turning off the swap file in the historic era of VM infancy was the best way to remove the hard drive bottleneck from system. The operating systems of yester-year did not have good page cache schemes that took advantage of all that unused memory. It is a little different now.
Applications are so modularized that they are broken up into a billions of smaller libraries so that code can be shared. This increases memory efficiency by keeping a shared library resident for multiple processes. These libraries are frequently accessed, more often than many people realized. Getting THOSE into memory is better than making sure my 500+ Linux applications stay resident.Notice that on a web server with 1GB of RAM the Linux kernel is still putting things out to swap. These processes that stay asleep for long periods of time do not need to waste the memory that page cache is currently using (892309504 bytes or 753.7MB). What would be stored in that 753.7MB of memory? The database that drives the website (instead of having to seek the disk). The entire web page hierarchy used to display pages on the web site. All the scripts that are used to display dynamic content on the web site (etc. etc.)
Now, if we subtracted from the page cache the amount of memory that was stored in the swap file, we would have over 200MB less that we could keep cached in memory. That could be an entire database that the kernel would then waste needless CPU cycles to fetch from disk.
The only advantage to turning off a swap file on these modern machines would be for a machine that runs only a select few applications, and not having a lot of processes in the background doing things.
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Unfortunately the current crop of best guess VM managers end up denying the end user the experience of their computer's peak performance. Coupled with the horrible state of application bloat, modern 'state of the art' hardware and software combine to give us less and less in terms of overall performance. Software developers throw more code at the cpu to add functionality with little or no concern for performance. And hardware manufacturers add more and more 'special instructions' and 'pipelining' which the majority of software is completely unable to access. If anything it's more like a bunch of dysfunctional co-dependents than an industry that is cogent as to what really needs to be going on. If the folks dealing with processors and the application software could take a page from the gamers (look at the high levels of integration between game engines and video cards) for example, and more effort put into consolidating functionality in dlls and shared libraries; we would be amazed at how truly fast these machines could perform.
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